


Triskaidekaphobia

by thedevilchicken



Category: Original Work
Genre: Ghosts, M/M, Memory Alteration, Memory Loss, Mental Disintegration, Mental Health Issues, Obsessive-Compulsive, Original Character(s), Original Fiction, Scotland, Suicide Attempt, Tattoos
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-18
Updated: 2015-10-18
Packaged: 2018-04-26 22:48:53
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,338
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5023570
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thedevilchicken/pseuds/thedevilchicken
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Tom and Sean are lovers. The problem is Tom doesn't remember.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Triskaidekaphobia

**Author's Note:**

  * For [snack_size](https://archiveofourown.org/users/snack_size/gifts).



Tom counts. 

There are eight steps from his bed to the bedroom door. Five steps from bedroom to bathroom, three from the door to the toilet. Fifty brushstrokes to each quarter of his mouth, back and forth and back and forth, teeth front and back, spit, mouthwash, spit. Floss, back and forth and forth and back, ten times for each space between his teeth. Shower. Five rubs of each arm with a fresh white towel, five of each leg, repeat until complete. 4.5 minutes to dry his hair. 4.5 minutes to shave. 

He could do it without the numbers, but he always liked to count. He could do it in the dark or with his eyes closed - he did that once, when the electric was off, and found without surprise that he knew exactly where each thing was, knew where to place each footfall even in the winter morning dark. He has a routine that never varies. It’s sense memory now; it’s instinct. 

He put on the clothes he’d laid out the night before, each movement timed, precise, like the steps of a dance. He’d always been just as neat since his childhood, in actions, in ideas and in dress. People had commented on it, though not always to his face. 

Then, the stairs. His lips moved faintly as he counted them just the way he’d done for the past eight years: 

One two three. Four five six. Seven eight nine. Ten eleven twelve. 

Thirteen. 

A pause then; a frown. He stopped still at the foot of the stairs, his well-polished shoes dangling from one hand. There were only twelve steps, up to down or down to up, only ever twelve steps because he’d counted them at least twice daily since the day that he’d moved in. So he climbed he and counted again. 

One. Three. Six. Nine. Twelve. 

Thirteen. 

Panic didn’t set in immediately, perhaps just because there wasn’t time. He lived in a village outside the city, took the bus to work each day and his morning was timed to perfection. Were he not out the front door in three minutes he’d miss the bus and wait thirty for the next, making him late to work for the very first time. So he put on his shoes, tied his laces, retrieved his bag and added in the lunch he’d pre-packed the night before. His counts were always perfect. By the time that he reached work, it was all so very, _very_ perfect that he'd practically forgotten step thirteen. Practically. 

His boss was a woman named Valerie, Scottish through and through, pleasant enough but the type that would gossip without ever quite realising that she did it. Honestly, Tom had never understood how she’d come to be Head of Communication Services; that was just the company’s over-fancy title for specialist tech support and Val only used her computer on special occasions, just email to their higher-ups and Skype to her grandson in Sydney twice each month. Still, it seemed that she liked everyone, including Tom, though he point-blank refused to talk about his life outside of work, thus thwarting her unintentional gossip-mongering before it could even begin. 

She smiled as he made his way to his desk, just like she always did. Then she handed him a huge stack of papers, duplicates of every item that he’d find waiting in his inbox, just like she always did. It was reassuring in a way, he thought. Val had never changed; perhaps nothing else had, either. 

7.5 hours in the office per day, 0.5 hours outside on a picnic bench eating his lunch. Tom broke it down further, to the minutes and seconds he’d work on each call, each system upgrade, each workaround, each know-it-all client who wouldn’t follow clear instructions because they always knew better than tech support. He didn’t mind his job, or supposed he couldn’t complain since he’d chosen it above several others. The subtle mix of good if not excellent pay, the high-level access and total lack of authority seemed to suit him. He didn’t want to be a tech specialist on call, didn’t aspire to management or anything above his 35K per year for his terribly niche expertise. He left the office each day at 5pm; it suited his sense of order. 

1,227 measured strides from the bus stop to his front door. Two steps from the door to the hooks where he hung up his coat. Turn back; bend to sweep the post from the floor. Three leaflets for The Occupier, three letters for Mr Thomas Koyamada of 13, Yew Tree Close, as if there were a yew tree anywhere in the vicinity. Thirteen. His stomach clenched. He glanced at the stairs. 

“Tom?”

He froze. 

Tom wasn’t a small man. He stood just over six feet tall, his physique reflecting the precision of minutes and repetitions counted out in his home gym. The sets appealed to his nature, as did the counting of calories, calculations of BMI, the number of steps in his day. He wasn’t even scared by the voice itself, someone’s presence in his home, though he didn’t recognise the sound of it. He just knew that he should be out of his shoes and in the kitchen by then. His routine was broken. 

“Who’s there?”

A form appeared in the kitchen doorway, so much late afternoon light behind it that the features were washed out in shadow. It was a man, though, of about Tom’s height and build. 

“Who the hell are you?” Tom asked. His voice sounded tight, without as much control as he would usually have liked. This was far from usual, however, and so he more or less forgave himself. 

The man stepped forward. There was a baseball bat in the cupboard under the stairs but whoever this was, he was standing in front of it, blocking the way. 

“That’s not funny.”

Tom frowned. “It wasn’t meant to be,” he said.

“Christ, Tom. Not again.”

The figure stepped out of the sun, suddenly all bright red hair and storm-grey eyes, baggy denim shorts and odd, twisting tattoos that flowed over his arms and calves. The voice was Scottish, soft and not familiar in the slightest. He didn’t know him. He’d never seen him before. 

“I don’t know you.”

The man smiled wryly, raking his fingers through that loose, long red hair. “I know,” he said. “You say that every time this happens.” He turned to the living room door, then he looked back at Tom as he pushed it open. “Come sit down. I’ll see if I can explain.”

Tom didn’t know why he followed, but he did. He stepped down the hallway to the living room door and he followed him inside, almost wishing right then that he hadn’t because this wasn’t his room, at least not the way he remembered it. His computers were there, yes, on the benches that lined the far wall so they’d always be out of the sun. But the desk on the opposite wall, the boxes of art supplies, the disorganised muddle of pens and pencils, pastels, charcoal on the desktop, the ink stains, the jumble of clothes on the sofa, those weren’t his. He wasn’t artistic, and he just didn’t live that way. Everything had a place and was always in it.

“What did you do?”

The man scooped up the clothes from the sofa and tossed them into a half-empty box of poster paints, then settled himself down. 

“I didn’t do anything,” he said, looking up at him. “I live here, Tom. I’ve lived here for the past three years.”

“I think I’d remember.” Tom shook his head, black hair in his eyes. This was absurd. He didn’t recognise this man, had never seen him before in his life as far as he knew. There was nothing about him that stood out as familiar. He gestured at him. “I don’t know you!”

“You’d think you would but look, you _don’t_ remember.” The wry smile reappeared. “I’m Sean, Tom. I’ve been living with you for three years. You’ve known me since we started uni.”

“I want you out of my house.”

“Look, like I’m telling you, this is _our_ house. I’m not going anywhere.”

“I don’t know why you’re doing this, but it’s not going to work.”

The man – Sean – dropped his head into his hands and sighed, deeply. Tom frowned. None of this made sense. He didn’t know him, he was sure; he lived alone and had since he’d left home down in London to come up to Scotland. He’d gone to university there in Edinburgh, started there over a decade ago, and he did not know this man, had not even the slightest flicker of recognition for him. But he sounded so genuine, and so sad, as if Tom’s reactions truly hurt or disappointed. It made no sense to him at all.

“If you were here to rob me, wouldn’t you have done it already?”

Sean didn’t shift his head from his hands. His voice was muffled when he replied, “I’m not robbing you.”

“And if you were robbing me, why would you put all this stuff in my house?”

“I’m not robbing you, Tom.”

Five steps to the couch. Tom sat down heavily, almost shaking, his eyes squeezed shut. “I don’t understand.”

He felt the sofa cushions shift with Sean’s unfamiliar weight. He felt Sean’s arm around his shoulders, and he stiffened beneath it. He didn’t understand _at all_. 

“Then let me explain.”

He said his name was Sean McKinley. 29 years old, just like Tom, and they’d met in halls sometime in their first week of uni. Tom studied Computing and Sean did Fine Art, lived four doors down and screwed up his laptop on a regular basis, knocked on Tom’s door with a sheepish smile about twenty times in three months to get free tech support from his patient neighbour. 

Sean said he didn’t know when Tom had started to notice he was doing it on purpose, just so it wouldn’t seem weird when he came over to lounge on his bed with cheap pizza and bottles of beer. Sean said he’d blushed like a fool when Tom told him to just leave the laptop alone, stop getting viruses on purpose and just knock on the door if he wanted to, and that leaving _Monster Cocks 7_ there on his hard drive was just setting himself up for disappointment. He blushed when he told Tom how two nights later he’d been down on his knees in Tom’s room, proving just how disappointed he wasn’t. 

They were a couple, he said. They had been since the second semester of their first year at uni. Tom had known he was gay since he was thirteen years old but he’d never in his life had anything like a steady boyfriend. He thought he’d remember, if only the tattoos. 

Sean kissed him like he thought that would help. When he pushed him away, Sean winced. 

\---

Tom locked his door when he went to bed and he didn’t sleep for hours. 

The house was full of Sean’s things. Since the day Tom had moved in it had seemed somewhat empty, though he’d ceased to notice that years ago; he’d bought it with the money from his dad’s life insurance, money his mother had hidden away in a kind of trust fund until he’d turned 21. It was an old three-bed cottage in a sleepy little Scottish village by the coast where the sea was just minutes away, its ceilings and exposed beams almost low enough to feel a little claustrophobic but otherwise the space was vast, enough to make one occupant feel more than a little lost. 

Now those empty spaces were filled with Sean’s clothes, sketchbooks, twelve pairs of skate shoes on a rickety homemade shoe rack, a broken skateboard that when queried had sparked a conversation about a compound fracture of the tibia and a dislocated patella, ruptured tendons and months of physio with all the attendant scarring. Tom had been there with him when he’d done it, Sean said, was the one who called 999 from an old brick of a mobile phone and kept him awake, pressing a shirt over the bloody wound while they waited for the ambulance. He’d been the first person Sean had seen when he’d woken up after surgery. Tom touched those scars at his knee for a second and then jerked his hand away. He didn’t remember any of it. 

It wasn’t amnesia, that much he knew as he lay there in bed that night. There was no gap where the memories that Sean had described should have been; he remembered his life, but that was a life without Sean in it. 

He’d never taken drugs and rarely drank, didn’t smoke. He’d had no recent head injuries – or head injuries at all - and wasn’t prone to fits of overactive imagination. His friends were names on the screen of an MMORPG and there was no one in his life who’d have the will or means to play such an elaborate prank. He’d always been content to be alone throughout his life. He fell asleep trying to avoid the only other explanation. He didn’t want to calculate the odds that the _other_ explanation was the correct one.

Still, in the morning he called his mother. 

Sometimes Tom just wasn’t sure if he’d gone to uni up in Edinburgh because that was where he was born or just to get away from his mother. Rationally, he knew she’d been busy while he was young, that with her lack of extended family and the fact she was a single mother, if she’d given up work then they’d have ended up only God knew where when her savings ran out and not in the house in Hampstead with the high iron gates and all the gadgetry he could wish for. Of course, he’d just wanted her to love him and not leave him with the nanny, this nanny, that nanny, so many nannies, while she whirled around the world. 

But right then she was living alone in their old London house, sending him postcards from Berlin and from Rome, Tokyo, Phuket, the places she went because apparently they needed whatever kind of non-destructive testing it was that her grandfather’s company had developed what seemed like aeons ago. Tom had never attempted to understand it, had never wanted to succeed her. Her work had always been the most important detail in her life, not Tom and definitely not his father. If they’d ever actually been married, the divorce would have been final when Tom was three years old; it was the longest relationship his mother had ever had, and the most successful. Tom took his father’s surname the day he turned eighteen. He didn’t like to be reminded of his mother.

“Could I speak to Mrs Miller, please?” 

The phone felt slick, slippery in his hand. He hated that he was nervous. 

“Who can I say is calling?”

He didn’t answer. He hung up the phone instead and headed for the shower. Eight steps, five, three, fifty brush strokes, a hundred, one-fifty, two hundred. Retrace steps. Dress. The routine calmed him as it always did, until his breath came easily as he pulled on his tracksuit bottoms and a faded old t-shirt. It was the weekend, of course, so a couple of hours in the gym downstairs seemed in order, something about the simplicity of it that took his mind off everything and anything at all. 

Of course, that was where he found Sean. 

He felt like such a cliché: there was the sink of his stomach as he realised that it had not all been a very, very strange dream; there was the spike of interest as he watched a shirtless man he didn’t know lying there on the bench lifting weights. A light sheen of sweat stood out on Sean’s fair skin, his red hair darker with it and clinging to his forehead, though the majority of it remained tied back in a messy ponytail. As Sean sat up, a cautious smile on his face, Tom’s body didn’t seem to care that it didn’t know him. He took a deep breath. He wasn’t steady. His calm was gone.

“Feeling any better?” Sean asked. 

“I was feeling fine last night,” Tom replied, a little too curtly, and the tone he’d used so unintentionally made him frown. Sean chuckled. 

“I guess I was hoping you’d remember something,” he said, pushing back the loose strands of damp hair from his forehead as he reached for a bottle of water with his other hand. Tom’s eyes followed the strange, winding tattoos down that arm to his wrist, thick as twisted black arteries, wires, weeds. 

“I don’t remember.” He took another breath and let it out slowly, then he made his way over to the treadmill. A couple of beeps and it was set; he stepped on and began at a jog. “You said this has happened before, right?”

“A couple of times, yeah.” Sean put down the bottle and picked up some dumbbells, lighter than Tom would’ve pictured him choosing but perhaps he was working his way up. “It doesn’t usually last that long. I think the worst was about a week.”

“So then I just… remember you?”

“It’s like nothing ever happened.” 

Tom shook his head as he started to up the pace just a little. “I don’t know if that’s going to happen this time.”

“And that’s what you always say. But it always does.”

He ran. He ran for five minutes until Sean had left the room and then he upped the settings; another fifteen after that and Sean popped his head back round the door to say he’d be going out for a while. He watched him go, denim shorts and skate shoes, a slight limp that Tom probably wouldn’t have noticed if he hadn’t seen the scars, rucksack over his shoulder, long hair tied back. He didn’t look like anyone the straight-laced Tom Koyamada would even think about being with, were he honest, though he supposed his own hair was just about comparable in length. But that was where the similarity both began and ended, considering Tom’s penchant for neatness, his sensible clothes, his excessive IT literacy and the count he kept there in his head. 

He took a bottle of water from the fridge in the kitchen and frowned. Some of the contents he recognised, but some were Coke and leftover meat-feast pizza, a half-empty tin of baked beans and a half-eaten Mars. He felt light-headed and it wasn’t from the run. He took two long sips of water from the bottle just to make sure of that, and then he left the kitchen. 

The living room was the same, half his and half those things that weren’t, the desk and the art supplies, the clothes strewn over the couch that had apparently multiplied since the previous night. His DVD collection seemed larger but mercifully still alphabetised, CDs with rather more punk and classic rock than he recalled ever owning. When he turned on the radio, it was tuned to Planet Rock. The last TV channel used was Sky Sports News. This wasn’t him.

The study was the same. Half the books were his, the ones he remembered, but the extra space had all been filled with manga all printed in Japanese. He found an extra birth certificate with all of his important documents, one for Sean Christopher McKinley. He found his passport, a National Insurance card, the identity of a man he didn’t know all there in that desk drawer. Sean’s bank statements were in the filing cabinet along with his. A third file was their joint account, statements going back at least two years. He felt sick. 

Upstairs, the room he’d always thought of as his guest room was stuffed full of all Sean’s clothes and it definitely lacked the second bed that he remembered being there. A well-worn guitar stood in the corner, and Tom had never played. The third bedroom, empty as far as Tom remembered except for folded-up, emptied moving boxes, was where he found the guest bed, evidently where Sean had slept the previous night, evidently _not_ where he was accustomed to sleeping. Tom rested his forehead against the wall and closed his eyes. 

“I don’t know him,” he murmured. “This is not my life.”

\---

“Do anything nice at the weekend?”

Val had been that same kind of perversely, pervasively cheerful person for as long as Tom had known her, and he’d been in that same job since he’d left university. She liked to chat, she liked to know the precise ins and outs of every colleague’s personal life and above all she seemed to love to catch Tom when he definitely did not want to talk. Especially given the fact that his weekend had been anything but normal. 

Tom shrugged, though his shoulders felt tight. “Same as every weekend, really. Games and TV.”

Val frowned. “Wasn’t this weekend that thingie in Manchester with whatshisname?”

“Err…” He frowned.

“You know. Your friend the artist. Sam?”

He sighed, closing his eyes just briefly, thankful that Val’s desk was a good three metres behind him so she couldn’t see his somewhat perplexed expression with his back to her as it was. 

“Sean?”

“Yes!”

A pause. He looked back up at his screen, currently swimming with equal parts email and eBay as he tried to distract himself from whatever this was; sadly, he managed only three taps of his keyboard before Val spoke again. 

“So, was it?”

“Was it what?”

“That thing. In Manchester.”

He clenched his teeth. “No.”

“But I thought--”

“It wasn’t.”

For once, he must have let his feelings on the matter creep into his words because Val returned to her own computer and her light-speed typing that had somehow managed to survive the translation from typewriter to PC, followed by the usual slow, pecking taps as she decided how exactly sending the email worked. Usually, it amused Tom that she refused to believe that she couldn’t irreparably damage the computer if she clicked the wrong button, especially as she had a small but talented team of IT technicians sitting just a few metres away. That particular day, he couldn’t even summon the faintest hint of a smile. 

Val knew Sean, or knew _of_ him. He glanced around the surrounding desks; Paul and Jamie and Sarah probably did, too. He didn’t want to think about what that meant. 

The weekend had been strange to say the least. Sean had taken up residence in the living room when he’d come back in from the shops, sprawled on the couch with a sketchbook and tried to look somewhat unfazed as Tom played games on the computer and asked the odd question across the room. Sean cooked and Tom ate cautiously, trying not to notice how Sean looked at him with that same crushed but hopeful expression. Sean already knew everything about him, knew every detail when he asked, knew more than anyone should have known about how he’d grown up, how he lived, how he thought. 

Sean had asked quietly if Tom had spoken to his mother; Tom just stood up and left the room. Ten minutes later, he’d wanted to apologise. 

Now, they all knew Sean. 

“Could I speak to Mrs Miller, please? It’s her son.”

“Just a moment. I’ll put you through.”

He closed his eyes. He steeled himself. 

“Sweetheart?”

“It’s me.”

She’d had her fourth breakdown in a 5-star hotel somewhere in Geneva, three months after she’d left her third husband. Tom was 19 then and already in Edinburgh. It appeared that at that time he may or may not have been living four doors down the corridor from a man he hadn’t known existed three days ago. He didn’t even recall there being a fourth door. 

She still had scars at her wrists from the first time she tried to kill herself. They’d never talked about it, even when she took all those pills on his thirteenth birthday, when she tried to drown herself on her second honeymoon, when she called him screaming in the middle of the night sometimes because they were trying to make her kill herself again, because she loved him so much, because she didn’t know who else to call. He’d stopped picking up the phone years ago, but the postcards she sent were all in a box in the study at the back of a cupboard. He’d never thrown her away completely. Lydia Miller was stubbornly complex to excise. 

“Mum, what’s it like when you--?”

“When I what, sweetheart?”

He paused, clenched and unclenched his jaw because he frankly did and didn’t want to ask because he didn’t want to know. 

“When-- I mean, when you’re in hospital. What’s it like?”

_Institutionalised_ was the word, more like. It had happened more than once, and more than twice. They said she wasn’t stable but she’d be fine if she took the medication, took the tablets on time, every day and always. If she went to her appointments and she did as she was told. But she’d never liked to and Tom liked to believe he hated her for that. 

“It’s just like every other day, Tom. Except everyone looks at me like I’m crazy.”

She didn’t ask him why he’d asked and she didn’t call him back when he hung up. He suspected she already knew.

\---

A week later and nothing had changed. He didn’t remember. As far as he knew, there was nothing _to_ remember. 

Sean said they’d spent six months after uni meandering together around Japan – Tom remembered the trip to Japan but not Sean and definitely not Sean being there with him. He’d gone to see his family, his father’s family, the Koyamadas who he’d seen so infrequently over the years. There’d been a week or maybe two every summer when his grandmother flew over to London, but she always stayed in hotels and they spoke in strange, broken phrases that jangled Tom’s nerves and tipped him oddly off-kilter. He’d only ever spoken to his grandfather over the phone before the visit. His uncle and aunt sent him Christmas cards when they remembered. His cousin Hiroshi had been his pen pal for a while, many years ago, while they’d been learning each other’s language. He’d felt so out of touch by the time he was 21. 

As it turned out, Sean spoke better Japanese than he did. Tom’s language skills weren’t exactly the worst, and he could get through most conversations with just enough ease, but Sean’s accent was perfect. He told him – in Japanese – all about the three months that they’d spent there, travelling, checking back in with Tom’s family out on the coast every couple of weeks. Sean hated the ocean; Tom had always loved it. When Sean spoke, there was such openness and detail that Tom could almost believe him. 

Sean was an artist. Tom would walk in and find he’d be doodling idly on a sketchpad he seemed to produce from thin air, but then he met him one day after work, by arrangement, one late afternoon as the sun was setting, in a greasy spoon just outside the city centre. He had expensive-looking paper strewn all over tacky 70s Formica, pages of what he told him was the twelfth issue of something called Death Trap. He had a deadline in three days’ time. Apparently he made his money as a fairly well-paid mangaka, writer and illustrator of comics in Japanese, and the whole damn thing was written in that same perfect Japanese. He never said where he’d learned it. It was probably some sort of uni thing, or else he’d learned it to watch anime porn without subtitles.

Tom found the original drawings for the rest of the series in box files stacked up in his living room, organised in order of date with an index all written by hand – it was Tom’s handwriting, of that much he was sure. And when he finally looked up Sean McKinley online, he found a photo of him done up like some kind of cyberpunk, the space between his winding tattoos all filled in shiny metallic blue; Tom was leaning on his shoulders as he sat there, smiling. Tom almost shivered as he read the caption: _mangaka Sean M with boyfriend Tom, Tokyo 2004_. 

Sean said he was born on an island, a tiny one miles off the Scottish coast that he never actually named, a relic where no one locked their doors because they’d never had a reason to. They were fishermen, or his father had been but he’d died at sea when he was very young. He was raised by his grandparents after his mother went to the mainland to work, lonely since the little island’s little school had maybe twelve kids besides him and they were all a few years older. They had an old church and an old school, an old pub and a ferry to the mainland once a day, little rowing boats they played in though they knew they shouldn’t. He said his grandparents could still remember a young boy being swept right out to sea and never found. It sounded like such a cold but friendly place, and Sean spoke of it with deep affection. 

Tom wasn’t sure that such a place existed anymore. He didn’t tell him so. He wasn’t even sure that Sean existed. 

Two weeks. Three weeks. Tom was counting the hours, hoping that something would slip into place the way that Sean said it always had before. They ate together, Sean’s cooking rather good, sat together in the evenings, Tom at his computer working on programming one of the iPhone apps he sometimes tried to sell in his spare time, Sean drawing as he hummed bad pop-punk under his breath and occasionally flashed him a smile. He seemed tired. They went to bed in separate rooms. 

Four weeks. 

“I get it,” Sean said, as they talked around a film on TV. “I have to earn your trust again.” He paused, gave that same wry smile that was slowly becoming quite familiar. “I can wait. Just don’t let it be too long.”

Five. 

Sean used words like obsequious and promulgate, winked and made Tom smile in spite of everything. He was interesting, from his flame-red hair to the twisting, turning tattoos.

They went to the convention Val had asked about a month too early. Sean had a table signing his books, the new English translations that had just hit the shelves and were making him popular in certain circles. Tom had read them – it was like a cross between Batman and Saw in a completely bizarre sort of way, so subtly gay in a way that made Tom snicker when the guys on the forums asked where all the girls were. They had fun there. Tom only paused for a second when the organisers asked him to smile for the camera, one arm wrapped around Sean’s broad shoulders. That bothered him later.

But Sean’s skin was cold. When Sean turned to him when the photo was done, his face so suddenly just scant inches from his, so close it almost hurt his eyes to focus, in seconds his cheeks were ten times, twenty times, as warm as Sean’s clothed skin. 

Six weeks. Seven. Eight. 

Sean was almost unremarkable in every way and in the end Tom found that quite remarkable in and of itself. Even features. Lips not too thin or full. Slim but not skinny. Muscular but far from the cover of some creepy bodybuilding magazine. They liked the same things; Sean’s taste augmented his. His smile made Tom smile in return. He found himself mentioning him at work, to hell with Val’s gossiping nature. 

When Sean touched him, seeming casual about it but the look he gave him said each move was calculated, Tom slowly learned not to flinch or back away. He learned there was no threat in Sean standing close as they bought comics in town or Sean sitting close as they ate out in a restaurant, that he had no nefarious intentions in straightening his collar before he left for work in the mornings, even when his chilly fingertips brushed his neck and made him blush. He learned just how confusing all of that could be. 

“I love you,” Sean told him, a whisper as he brushed by on his way up to bed. There was no expectation in his tone, just honesty. He glanced back at Tom as he mounted the stairs, gave a faint smile that Tom returned only weakly. 

“I don’t know you,” he thought, as he watched him go. “I don’t know you don’t know you don’t know you. I _don’t_.” But the real struggle was trying to make himself believe that mattered for an instant. 

Nine. Ten weeks. Eleven. Twelve. 

The time mounted up. Three months and he remembered nothing of Sean before that time, though the stories Sean told had always been so layered with detail that from time to time he almost thought he could remember. He knew that was just wishful thinking. He wanted to remember. He wanted to connect. 

Eight steps from his bed to the bedroom door. Five steps from bedroom to bathroom, his pulse quickening. His hand fumbled at the door handle. He stepped inside. 

“Tom?”

Sean was in the shower. He couldn’t say he hadn’t known because he’d heard it quite clearly from his bedroom. He couldn’t say it wasn’t intentional because he’d thought about it every morning for a month, thought about stepping into that room, what he’d find when he did. He’d touched himself at night, fighting off guilt as he thought about this man he didn’t know with whom he’d been sharing his home for these past three months, as he imagined him, imagined touching him, imagined being touched. 

“I’m sorry.” 

His mouth was dry. He felt like a fool and was stepping back, beating his retreat already as Sean opened the glass shower door to look at him. 

Sean was naked, wet from the shower, red hair darker with water. The tattoos were so dark against his skin, running up his arms and down the sides of his body where they’d often been hidden under shirts and shorts, vines or veins or roots or weeds that coiled around him from his arms and down his sides right down to his ankles. They left a long swath over his chest and his abdomen completely and starkly bare in contrast, but for a sprinkling of that same red hair. Tom swallowed. 

“Tom, is everything alright?” 

He nodded. “Yes. I--” He turned, closed the door, and closed them both inside, rested his forehead down against it for a moment before he turned back to Sean in the steamy bathroom air. “I’ve been thinking.” He stepped forward. “I don’t know if I’ve been fair.” 

“Fair?”

He raised one hand, faltered just a second before he rested it at the centre of Sean’s wet chest, cold despite the heat of the shower. And slowly he started to let it slide down, fingertips following the contour of the long, lean muscles beneath his skin.

“Tom, you don’t have to do this,” Sean said, but his tone didn’t say stop. 

“I know,” Tom said. “But I think I want to.”

It took an awkward moment to push down his pyjama bottoms over his hips and let them slip to the floor, but he did it despite the flush he could feel over almost every single inch of his skin. He raised his hands, pushed back, moving the two of them in under the spray of the shower. Sean reached past him and closed the glass door behind them, the action pressing him closer just for a moment. 

“Are you sure?” Sean asked, as one hand found Tom’s to guide it down between them. 

Tom nodded. Tom’s fingers found Sean’s sex already as hard as his own.

“I’m sure,” he said, and they kissed one moment after. Sean’s skin had the sharp taste of salt. 

\---

There were eight steps from Tom’s bed to the bedroom door. There were five steps from bedroom to bathroom, three to the toilet. Fifty brushstrokes to each quarter of his mouth, mouthwash, floss. Shower. Five rubs of each arm with a fresh white towel, five of each leg until dry. 4.5 minutes drying his hair. 4.5 minutes shaving. 

The clothes were there that he’d laid out the night before, and he put them on. Then, the stairs. 

One. Three. Five. Nine. Eleven.

Twelve. 

“Sean?”

Silence. 

The boxes from the living room were gone, an empty space where Sean’s desk had been. No clothes in the second bedroom, the bed from the third back in place there instead. Birth certificate and passport missing. Ever-present pizza now absent from the fridge. 

Sean was gone. Even the Japanese websites didn’t know a Sean McKinley. It was just as if he’d never been there at all. 

Life returned to normal then, almost right away; work followed by long hours of app development followed by sleep in the bed that for three brief nights he’d shared with a man who it seemed had never existed. He missed him. The house seemed emptier than it had ever been before, and nothing could fill it. 

He visited his mother. She was back in hospital, another suicide attempt, half-hearted as ever; she always said after that she’d never tried to die, she just needed to be saved and Tom almost understood that, and her, for the first time in his life. After all, it seemed he really was his mother’s son. He hadn’t known just how much he could miss what he’d never really had. 

A few weekends he spent doing research, just because he thought he should. He’d seen the horror films, the thrillers, the psychiatric patient conjuring what they wanted or they feared or what their life was missing from slivers of reality. The internet didn’t help at all, just spat out Sean McKinleys who were builders or doctors or juvenile delinquents, a couple of artists but not the right kind and not the right one, not even the right country. One burned in a house fire, one drowned in the sea. His Sean just didn’t exist, and so that would be the end of it. 

But at night sometimes he couldn’t keep from remembering. 

Sean’s skin was so cold but so supple, so alive, his smile bright, his eyes grey like the sky over the sea in a storm. He remembered the confusion he’d felt the first time he’d seen him and how that confusion had sprawled, continued through thirteen weeks of life the way it had never really been. He remembered the shift of the mattress as Sean turned in his sleep, the way Sean’s fingertips felt as they grazed his skin. He remembered the softness and the chill of his mouth, lips that met his, kisses that left them both breathless and laughing from it. The body beneath him had felt so real when Tom moved in him that he could have never believed he’d dreamed it. He tried to forget just how Sean hands and mouth had made him ache and flush in pleasure. He stroked himself, desperate, and choked out a sob as he came. 

Things would never be the same again. 

Tom’s world had been ordered, counted, calculated, for as long as he could remember. The enumeration once soothed him but when Sean vanished, he stopped. Order seemed meaningless. He had no taste for it any longer. 

Three weeks after Sean, he quit his job; he took another, moved back to London. Three weeks later, he sold the house because of the memories that he didn’t really have and moved into a flat that by virtue of its size could never feel so empty. He called his grandparents and brushed up on his Japanese. He started reading manga, asked an ex-pat Japanese artist out to lunch but didn’t follow through because he knew what he wanted was Sean’s mouth, Sean’s stormy eyes, Sean’s hands at his hips as they moved together. He dreamed of Sean like he saw him through water, waiting, patient, pulled down by the tendrils of his many tattoos. 

A new business followed three weeks later, high end IT consulting, his technical niche without the gossiping Valerie there over his head. He smiled a lot but didn’t feel it, made money though he never cared much about that. His mother told him she was proud, as if she hadn’t been before and he refused to do work for her, told her he wouldn’t work for free if his moderate success mattered so very much. Back out of hospital, her job was still every inch her life. He still resented that, though somehow they felt closer than they’d been in years.

Three weeks later, his mother invited him plus one to her wedding; a week after that, he went alone. The new man was a rich Swiss banker named Heinrich who treated Tom’s mother with respect, but Tom could already see the ending. Lydia Graz, née Miller, formerly three other names that Tom could recall if he needed to but would never need to, was then 57 years old and on her fourth husband after her fourth collapse. Tom was never going to marry, he told himself that as he stepped out of the cab outside his building after the torturous wedding reception, as he made his way inside. He’d be a lifelong bachelor, and the thought really wasn’t so bad. His mother had stopped trying to set him up with the nice young men from her office. 

He had no idea how many steps led up to his flat. More than twelve. More than thirteen, at any rate. There were lifts to the thirteenth floor, of course, but he tended to walk them all, did that day in spite of the rather nice suit and tie he was still wearing from the wedding. He fumbled for the keys in his pocket then opened the door. 

“Tom?”

His breath caught. He shook his head. This wasn’t right. 

“Tom?”

He closed the door, locked it tight and tossed the keys onto the table in the hall. He rested his forehead against the wall. He closed his eyes. His heart leapt. His nerves all prickled. 

“Who are you?” 

He cast a sidelong glance along the hall. Sean stepped from the kitchen with an apron round his waist. He could smell homemade food, warm and inviting, Sean’s cooking the way he remembered though it didn’t exist. 

“Tom…”

“Who _are_ you?”

Sean sighed. “God, Tom, not again,” he said. 

Tom turned and he sank to the floor, his back to the wall as he let his head drop into his hands. He’d thought he was past this. He’d hoped he was and he’d hoped he wasn’t. He blamed his mother. He’d wanted him back. 

“You’re the thirteenth step,” Tom murmured, breathless, terrified, overcome. “Sean, you shouldn’t be here.”

Sean knelt by his feet, put his hands on Tom’s knees. They were cold. They were wet. He hadn’t been back for long. 

“Do you care?” Sean asked. He didn’t deny it. 

Tom looked up, paused, brought his palms to Tom’s cold cheeks and then he drew him down as his heart hammered with relief. He pulled him close. He held on tight. 

“I don’t care at all,” he said. And he didn’t, he saw that quite clearly then. Twelve steps or thirteen, thirteen weeks or forever, dead or alive, it didn’t matter. Sean was with him, for as long as he was with him.

When they kissed, Sean’s mouth was bitter with salt.


End file.
